Sunday, August 5, 2012

All You Need is Edgar Rice Burroughs

"The worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs
are never-never lands, dream worlds where virtue and courage win honor
and beauty, where evil can be identified and confronted, and despite
all odds defeated..." - Richard Lupoff

I never needed any self-help books about men being from Mars and women
from Venus, or how I learned everything I needed to know in
kindergarten. All I ever needed was Edgar Rice Burroughs, whom I
encountered when I was 11. I have never been the same since.

Burroughs, who unfortunately isn't really that well-known anymore, is best-known
as the creator of Tarzan (who in the books spoke as if he was quoting
Shakespeare, a far cry from the "me Tarzan, you Jane" in the movies).

But in his day ERB (as he is commonly known) was as popular as Stephen
King is now, and was, and still is, hugely influential. Carl Sagan,
for example, credited him with interesting him in space exploration and
science.

Writers
such as F. Paul Wilson, Philip Jose' Farmer and John Norman have been
influenced by Burroughs' novels about Tarzan, Barsoom (Mars),
Pellucidar (the inhabited interior of the Earth) and Venus. Probably
most writers of science fiction, fantasy and horror have been
influenced by him.

Perhaps
the first thing I noticed about Burroughs is that, much like Robert
Heinlein, none of his women characters are victims. And he was writing
in the early 1900's. Were he alive today, I suspect he would hold
Stalinist taterheads like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem in
contempt.

Such whiny, self-pitying women, who think everything would
be just fine if society was destroyed (and men's characters, too) and
remade according to the crackpot fantasies infesting their heads, can't
even begin to compare with a brave, smart, resourceful woman like
Tavia in A Fighting Man of Mars, who hacked off the arms of a couple of 15-feet-tall six-armed Martian apes.

Not
only were Burroughs' women not victims, they were handy not only with
swords but also with pistols, although they were "radium" pistols, a
weapon whose workings still puzzle me. Dejah Thoris, the Princess of
Mars, once skewered a villain several times, then she kicked his
worthless carcass over a cliff. Maybe Barsoomian females did give birth
by laying eggs, but they were no chickens.

Yet,
Burroughs' women were still feminine. There was no competition with
men, and each sex got along just fine with the other. The main reason,
I'm sure, is that the Barsoomian State didn't interfere in the
relationships between the sexes, and so they fell into the natural,
proper ones.

At
11 I was immensely impressed by these saber-wielding, pistol-blasting
heroines. I suspect a lot of guys were, and are. A woman I know wrote
one article about how she was planning on shooting a pistol for the
first time, and got 300 emails from guys willing to instruct her. So,
girls, if you want to be popular, become proficient with a firearm.
Learning to hurl a dagger is not such a bad idea, either. Men will get
on their knees and salaam before you the way Wayne and Garth did
before Alice Cooper.

Neither
were the women always beautiful, the way they invariably are in the
movies. Tavia was described as "boyish," and in the long run the hero,
Tan Hadron, preferred her to the beautiful but haughty and shallow
Sanoma Tora. Although, to be honest, on the covers of most of the books
the physiques of both the men and women look as if they've been
inflated with an air hose. But then, the publishers were trying to sell
copies to boys in their early teens.

The
second thing I learned is that I was being conned in school. The
Warlord of Mars was the Earthman John Carter, a southerner from
Virginia who had fought in the Civil War (don't ask me how he got on
Mars). Hey, wait a minute - I had been taught in school the South was
an ignoble, maybe even evil society that fought a long, bloody war to
defend slavery. Yet Carter was a noble and honorable man, protector of
the oppressed, upholder of justice. Carter was always against slavery
and oppression. Who was I supposed to believe? What I was taught in the
government-run prison/school I despised, or a writer who bought me
fascination and awe?

Burroughs,
like Hemingway, was originally from the heavily residential Oak Park, a
medium-sized suburb stuck right up against Chicago. I've been there
several times. Apparently he found a better area to write about than
the one he was from.

The
third thing I learned is that maybe kings and queens are better than
democracy. Barsoom was ruled - and ruled justly - by John Carter and
Dejah Thoris. They barely appeared to rule at all. I really don't
remember a list of laws in any of Burroughs' novels, other than the
simple ones we all know - you don't murder, you don't steal. Otherwise,
you could do as you pleased.

But
there's not a word in any of his novels about mob rule. Most of them
read as if they could have been partly based on Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Democracy: the God that Failed. In fact, Burroughs doesn't have a good word to say about mobs. In The Gods of Mars
he does a hatchet-job on the blind fanatical mobs that fall for that
combination of the State, corrupt religion, and Big Business.

What
else? There are at least two kinds of villains. The least bad are the
sniveling, back-stabbing, lying cowards who are just great at running
their mouths but have nothing to back it up. I guess junior high
existed during Burroughs' school years, too.

The
worst villains, however, are those who want to conquer and rule the
world. Burroughs portrayed such people as practically insane with the
lust for power. They're the ones who wanted to impose a State on all of
Barsoom, and con armies into fighting for them. And in Burroughs'
worlds, they always failed, just as in do in our world, although often
at a horrendous cost in slaughter and destruction and misery.

Burroughs'
worlds are not a libertarian paradise. His novels are basically for
boys 11 to 14 years old. They're filled with sword fights and big apes
with fangs (and big spiders with fangs, too). But there's not a good
word in any of his novels for the State, or for politics, or for
politicians, or corrupt religion. There is, however, true love between
men and women as one of the highest values, and the desire for justice
and freedom.

Burroughs
wasn't the most stylish writer in the world. His style was workman-like
more than anything else. But he could tell a heck of a story, a far
better one than current writers who are far more stylish than he was.
If I had my way, I'd close down the government schools, salt the
ground (and pepper the teachers), then open up private ones and create a
better world by teaching my hero, ERB.